This companion volume to Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Gorgias Press, 2023) gives examples of colophons (and their translations) from the Ancient Near East up to the pre-modern world, in Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian.

The colophon, the ultimate or “crowing touch” paragraphs of a manuscript or a book, provides readers with a the historical context in which the scribe produced the manuscript (or the publisher, a book). At its most fundamental level, the colophon gives us the “metadata” of the manuscript: who was the scribe? When and where was the manuscript produced? For whom was it produced and who paid for it? But colophons are far more rich. They are literary works in their own right, having a style and rhetoric independent of the main literary text of the manuscript. Some are assertive, providing contextual data about the scribe/publisher and manuscript/book; others are expressive, demonstrating the scribe’s feelings and wishes. Some are directive, asking the reader for an action; others declarative, providing all sorts of statements about the scribe/publisher or even the reader. The latter sometimes provide historical facts otherwise lost to histories: wars, earthquakes, religious events, legal agreements, etc. This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to study colophons in various languages and traditions across space and time.

The most significant and by far largest collections of Zaydi manuscripts are housed by the many public and private libraries of Yemen, an endangered cultural heritage tradition, currently at risk due to the conflict and warfare in Yemen. The contributions brought together in this volume address a wide spectrum of aspects concerning Yemeni manuscript cultures, with some focusing on their history and present state within Yemen and others discussing the collections of manuscripts of Yemeni provenance in Europe and elsewhere.

This volume brings together contributions by scholars focussing on peritextual elements as found in Middle Eastern manuscripts: dots and various other symbols that mark vowels, intonation, readings aids, and other textual markers; marginal notes and sigla that provide additional explanatory content akin to but substantially different from our modern notes and endnotes; images and illustrations that present additional material not found in the main text. These elements add additional layers to the main body of the text and are crucial for our understanding of the text’s transmission history as well as scribal habits.

Iranian libraries hold only few manuscripts that testify to the extended and intensive Muʿtazilite past in the various centers of Zaydi scholarship in the Caspian region, in Ḫurāsān, and in Rayy. Among the few Muʿtazilite Zaydi works preserved in the libraries of Iran is a miscellany held by the library of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Shiraz (ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī Library). The maǧmūʿa, a facsimile of which is included in the present publication, was written between 673/1274-75 and 676/1277 and contains doctrinal works by Imāmi and Zaydi theologians from both Iran and from Yemen. Most of the codex consists of a theological summa, a taʿlīq that had been composed or transcribed by one Abū Ṭāhir b. ʿAlī al-Ṣaffār which was based on the Kitāb al-Uṣūl by Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Ḫallād al-Baṣrī, the distinguished disciple of the Muʿtazilite theologian and founder of the Bahšamiyya, Abū Hāšim al-Ǧubbāʾī (d. 321/933), with an unknown number of commentary layers in between.

In 1934 the New York Public Library (NYPL) purchased a sizable collection of 250 volumes of Arabic manuscripts through the fund for Semitic literature that had been provided by Jacob Heinrich Schiff. Ms New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Arabic Manuscripts Collection, Volume 51985A, a facsimile of which is included in the present publication, belongs to the Shīʿī material among the collection. It is a multitext volume of 269 leaves which in its present form comprises seven individual works. It is hoped that the present facsimile edition will enable and encourage scholars to delve into the materials it contains.

The history of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study dates back to 1935, and it is the one area of scholarship that has been continuously represented at the Institute ever since. The volume opens with a historical sketch of the study of the Near and Middle East at the Institute. The second part of the volume consists of essays and short studies by IAS scholars, past and present, covering fields such as the ancient Near East and early Islamic history, the Bible and the Qurʾān, Islamic intellectual history within and beyond denominational history, Arabic and other Semitic languages and literatures, Islamic religious and legal practices, law and society, the Islamic West, the Ottoman world, Iranian studies, the modern Middle East, and Islam in the West.